Both creativity and critical thinking have been flagged asessential 21st century skills, yet some people think of themas being as separate as oil and water. What’s your take?

It’s interesting that people see creativity and critical thinking
as being opposed. It’s partly because people associate
creativity with being totally free and unstructured. But what
we really have to get hold of is the idea that you can’t be
creative if you don’t do something.

You can be creative in math, science, music, dance, cuisine,teaching, running a family, or engineering. Because creativityis a process of having original ideas that have value. A bigpart of being creative is looking for new ways of doing thingswithin whatever activity you’re involved in. If you’re acreative chef, for example, then your originality is going to bejudged in terms of cuisine. There’s no point applying thecriteria of modern jazz to somebody who’s trying to create anew soufflé.